Weight Lifting For Beginners: Workouts & Equipment

Weight lifting as a whole is very beneficial for you. It has a lot of bad energy floating around it because of potential injuries and all the ladies out there are convinced it makes you too ‘bulky’. Injuries only occur with poor form, like any other exercise.

Yes you are holding a lot of weight, but it’s only dangerous if you don’t pay attention. As for ladies becoming too bulky, it’s simply a common myth. You can’t accidentally become too big via weight lifting, ladies.

Testosterone is what allows the lads to get as big as they do from weight lifting. Women don’t produce enough testosterone to bulk up like men. Weight lifting for women tones everything up, makes your butt bigger, and makes your boobs feel bigger. If you feel you are getting ‘too big’ all you have to do is stop lifting weights. Why not give it a try?

Starting Strength is an excellent program designed for complete beginners who wish to increase their strength. It was created by Mark Rippetoe and he’s been in the fitness industry for years. This program will increase your strength very fast and will allow you to learn all the main compound lifts.

You should always do a warm up and cool down, this is extremely important because it’ll prevent you from hurting yourself and will allow you to lift better. This program focuses on your linear gains.

When you first start out you will be able to increase the weight you lift every workout, this is what linear gains are. You will stay on this program until your linear gains have stopped, then you can move onto a more advanced lifting program.

If you want to know how much you increase the weight by and what to do when you’re stuck, I’ll cover that as soon as we’ve talked about the actual workouts.

Workout A:

3×5 Bench Press

3×5 Squat

1×5 Deadlift

Workout B:

3×5 Bench Press

3×5 Squat

3×5 Power Cleans

You need to workout 3 times a week and alternate the workout every time. Make sure you leave a rest day in between every work out as well. For example, on Monday I’ll do workout A, on Wednesday I’ll do workout B, and on Friday I will do Workout A. Then the next Monday start on workout B, and so on.

If you’re feeling up to the challenge I highly recommend you add pullups / chinups into your routine. They will help you massively on your fitness journey.

Where do I even start with this, it does everything. You can do all the different variations of pull ups / chin ups: close-gripped, wide-gripped, chin-up grip, pull-up grip, etc. On top of that, you can perform dips, you can perform push ups, and you can also perform ab exercises… It allows you to get a deeper motion into the movement.

All you need is a doorway. There’s no screws, no damage, just slip it over your door frame and you’re good to go. It will feel scary at first trusting all your weight onto just the door frame. But it will hold.

It takes less than 15 minutes to put together, and after that you never have to play around with it again unless you want to tighten the screws after a couple of months of use.

This workout bar is incredibly safe and stable. In the few years I’ve used this, I’ve never encountered a problem. It stays still and it can easily handle over 250 pounds. I only ever had one incident where I was being a bit silly and explosive. I pulled up too fast and it came off the door frame.

Okay, so you know the workouts and you’ve gotten yourself a decent pullup bar, but what weight do you start at? Your main goal is to find the maximum weight where you can do 5 reps with proper form and nice control. The best way to do this is start with just the bar for your first 5 reps.

After the first set, you add 5 pounds. After the second set, you add another 5 pounds. Then on your final set, you add another 5 pounds.

For your next following workouts you just want to increase the weight by 5 pounds for all 3 of the sets. Then the next workout you only add 5 pounds, etc. You may think this is too easy and it isn’t helping you at all, but it really is. It allows you to focus entirely on a perfect technique so you can get the most out of the routine and it allows you to focus on never injuring yourself.

When you find that perfect weight where it feels challenging you should find your form is perfect and controlled. From then on you should find that you can keep adding 5 pounds every workout or week to all of your lifts, maybe even more. These are the linear gains I was talking about.

Now I bet you’re wondering what you do if you get to a weight you can’t lift. I mean after all, you’re not going to keep adding 5 pounds every week until you can lift 2000 pounds. When you hit a wall and your lifts begin to stall. You have 2 options. You can start a new training program or you can do a deload.

A deload is when you stop your progression of adding 5 pounds on and you either reduce the weight by 5-10 pounds and do the same amount of reps or just use the same weight but reduce the number of reps. You then work your way back up to where you were originally and you’ll find that this has allowed you to catch up and you can carry on with your linear gains.

If you stall again after this, do exactly what you did before again or spice it up. Just make sure you deload. If you’ve deloaded 3 times in a row and you still can’t push to that extra weight it’s time for you to pick up a more advanced program.

There’s no set numbers that you need to switch programs at. It’s going to be different for everybody. The best thing you can do is just try it out.

If you want to learn more about Starting Strength, take a look at this link. There is loads I haven’t covered in this article. I’ve basically given you a crash course. You’ll find a ton more information here: